SharePoint Migration

Many organizations continue to use older versions of SharePoint due to inertia, lack of internal resources, or for avoiding risk associated with migrations. Thus sub-optimal SharePoint implementations, possibly with security holes after Microsoft stops support, continue to exist. But there is a better way. Apps4Rent’s SharePoint team with over 5000 successful migrations can help you break free from the old and lead you to the new. We can help you migrate to the latest version of SharePoint or move your SharePoint implementation from on-premises to the Cloud.

Sharepoint Migration – A Challenging Task

SharePoint migrations are much dreaded because most organizations lack the resources and expertise, internally. The fear of losing valuable content in the migration process doesn’t help either. It calls for restructuring the content which is complicated as SharePoint is relatively inflexible. It puts tremendous pressure on the IT teams of businesses. Checking for potential configuration compatibilities between the base and the target destinations, detect anomalies in the existing environment, scan and map user permissions, user names, user domains, and other legacy elements to the new system etc. can throw off the best of IT teams.

The major reasons why businesses are reticent or not upbeat about SharePoint migrations are:

Lack of flexibility:

Businesses that use a basic version of SharePoint with limited features may want to move to the latest version to improve collaboration. But they fear that a service provider may not be able to support additional functionality or new feature rollouts.

Customization concerns:

Any organization using a SharePoint site, almost always has customizations built in to their site. A messed-up migration may result is losing the custom codes.

Availability and reliability concerns:

Businesses demand high availability and zero downtime. SharePoint as a business-critical tool, they fear that the hosting provider will fail to deliver industry leading uptime guarantees, outage response-time and live up to service-level commitments.

‘Migration is difficult’ mindset:

It’s a fact that any migration exercise almost always throws unexpected errors and extremely difficult challenges that may threaten data/content security. Likewise, in a SharePoint migration task, the business anticipates problems. This has led to a mindset that migration is complex, and more often than not, is botched up.

Integration of third-party application:

SharePoint is relatively inflexible without third-party applications. These applications may further complicate a migration process.

User adoption and enablement challenges:

A SharePoint migration necessitates resetting user passwords or even to create new user accounts. This can bring down user adoption rates. Migrating to a hosted SharePoint environment increases reliability on service provider’s support resources. Businesses are wary of the fact that the provider may lack the resources and expertise to properly support user-enablement initiatives such as custom dashboards and UI elements.

Regulatory compliance:

Regulatory compliance is a bottleneck for businesses considering a SharePoint migration. Especially for public companies, or those working in regulated industries have concerns related to regulatory compliances because the existing SharePoint environment contains proprietary data they don’t want to risk losing in a messy migration task.

The apparel chain faced serious challenges managing its increasing workforce. This saw them choosing Apps4Rent to help install, monitor, and support a SharePoint 2013 farm site they adopted to increase collaboration between the workforce.

The company’s SharePoint server was unable to take heavy workload. They chose Apps4Rent to built a robust infrastructure on Azure cloud to migrate the SharePoint site. Apps4Rent completed the migration task in a record 3 weeks’ time.

Surgical Instruments, MInnesota The company did not want to waste its existing SharePoint licenses, 1100 and counting, while moving to the Cloud. Apps4Rent repurposed their existing licenses acquired under Volume License (VL) to the Cloud with Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance program

An auto parts manufacturer in a quest for a powerful online project management tool opted for Project Server 2016 version from the 2013 version. But they botched up the migration trying to do it in-house. Apps4Rent came into the rescue and put the migration task back on track.

Apps4Rent SharePoint Migration

Apps4Rent is a 1-Tier CSP and has over a decade of experience in migrating on-premise applications to the Cloud, with over five thousand SharePoint migrations carried out with no downtime and zero data loss. We simplify your move into our hosted environment or cloud and ease your transition process by guiding you at every step.

Our SharePoint experts are Microsoft Certified Professionals with deep expertise in all versions of SharePoint. Because an exercise like SharePoint migration happens once in every 5-10 years in a business, most internal IT teams may feel unequipped to carry out such a complex task.

But we do it every day. We have carried out more than 5000 SharePoint migrations, alone. Even while you read this, our engineers may be in the middle of a complex migration. That’s how frequent and repeatedly we do it.

The level of difficulty or complexity of a SharePoint migration is determined by which version of SharePoint you are currently using and which one do you want to move to. There are easy migrations that involve only a lift and shift task, yet there are complex ones that involve complete do over with changing the information architecture, content upgrades, user research etc.

If you are currently using old versions of SharePoint – 2010 or beyond up to 2003, you are likely to run into compatibility issues if you seek to move to the latest version, say SharePoint 2016. If you have custom SharePoint features built into your existing site, it will be even more difficult. Customizations in data structures, storage formats, accessibility and reporting features and other variables can all create difficulties in the migration task.

Migrating from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013.

While migrating from SharePoint 2010 to 2013, you must consider the following:

When you upgrade to SharePoint 2013, the look and feel of your site is not upgraded automatically. However, you can empower Site Collection admins to upgrade their sites on their own schedule

SharePoint 2013 will not use 2010 Office Web Apps (OWA) – OWA must be installed on your own server

SharePoint 2013 has let go of the pre-upgrade check command.

5000+ SharePoint migrations completed. Move from any older SharePoint versions to the latest 2016. Move in record time. Let experts carry out the migration.

Our SharePoint Migration Methodology

Our SharePoint experts take out all the complexities of the migration and create a step-by-step roadmap to ease you through the migration process.

Pre-migration

We plan your SharePoint migration well in time, conceptualize resource management utilization, carry out compatibility tests and do rigorous testing on laboratory environment. All these is because we cannot afford to have you encounter issues on the production environment once the migration is complete. We selectively migrate content as per business needs with granular content selection and finally perform test runs to validate migration plan configuration.

You provide us your SharePoint back up in .cmp and .bak formats

We provide you with an FTP location where you can dump your data.

We take the data from there and start restoring it into the target environment.

Once we have your content with us, we assess the state of the existing content, clean up the data, weigh factors like size, relevance, and sensitivity before finally identifying content that need to be migrated to the new environment as well as what needs to be built into the new system.

Migration

Because a migration task deals with restructuring legacy content, it traditionally disrupts day-to-day business. To avoid that, we perform subsequent incremental migrations to keep source and destination environments in sync with customizable scheduling. We use customizable filtering options based on content properties. This helps minimize business disruption as well as keep network bandwidth resources optimized. The resultant benefit is it allows your users to continue working on source environments until the destination SharePoint environment is approved for roll-out.

Below is a step-by-step, technical overview of a typical Katalyst SharePoint migration:

Delegate migration plan management based on administrative roles

Scan source content prior to migration to identify the scope of the migration

Selectively migrate content according to business needs with granular content selection and perform test runs to validate migration plan configuration

Perform full and subsequent incremental migrations only transferring content that has been updated since the last migration

Migrate into pre-created sites, or create sites on the fly

Preserve all metadata – including security settings, attributes, and properties utilizing customizable mappings to properly represent legacy elements and quickly take advantage of SharePoint’s features such as Managed Metadata

Migrate workflows – including those created with SharePoint native functionality, SharePoint Designer

Migrate actions – including user alerts, customized forms, views, and InfoPath forms – to the new site

Migrate online over existing networks, or offline to securely transfer data across firewalls

Prioritize existing migration plans to ensure projects are executed as per organizational timetables

Post Migration

Once the migration is complete, the verification of the migrated content in the new environment is essential. It is critical to compare the source and target environments, particularly if troubleshooting whether a document successfully made it to the new platform.

This is followed by sending automated e-mail to site owners or site collection administrators after the site migration is completed. Once that is done, the content is reviewed with site owners to ensure a smooth transition.

Take a look at our migration methodology. You will realize we are meticulous and carry expertise that not many can match.

We won’t let the migration disrupt your day-to-day business. Allow your users to continue working on source environments until the destination SharePoint environment is approved for roll-out.

Client “Quotes”

This is what our clients have to tell about our SharePoint migration capabilities –

California Based Apparel Chain“Apps4Rent’s SharePoint experts are easy to deal with, their ability to think on their feet and give creative solutions to business problems is truly amazing. Our SharePoint implementation has been running smoothly. Their infrastructure management processes are excellent. I think we chose the right partner for a critical business area that was asking for efficient management”

Minnesota Based Surgical Instrument Company“Apps4Rent suggested us bringing our VL licenses to cloud, to lighten the workload on the SharePoint site. We didn’t have to pay extra fees for moving the licenses. As a Microsoft Authorized Mobility Partner, they are experts in handling all the groundwork in managing the transfer of licenses and setting up the infrastructure on the cloud. It was a business-critical task which they made look easy.”